Fourth Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in the United States in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © Mare Vaporum Corp 2014
The right of Michael Cunningham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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Source ISBN: 9780007557677
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007557684
Version: 2015-02-19
This book is for Billy Hough
Empty, vast, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen. The flickering flame of the northern lights could be plainly seen, whether they rose high or low in the heavens, from every part of the castle. In the midst of its empty, endless hall of snow was a frozen lake, broken on its surface into a thousand forms; each piece resembled another, from being in itself perfect as a work of art, and in the centre of this lake sat the Snow Queen, when she was at home. She called the lake “The Mirror of Reason,” and said that it was the best, and indeed the only one in the world.
—Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen
Table of Contents
A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love. It was by no means his first romantic dropkick, but it was the first to have been conveyed by way of a five-line text, the fifth line of which was a crushingly corporate wish for good luck in the future, followed by three lowercase xxx’s.
During the past four days, Barrett had been doing his best to remain undiscouraged by what seemed, lately, to be a series of progressively terse and tepid breakups. In his twenties, love had usually ended in fits of weeping, in shouts loud enough to set off the neighbors’ dogs. On one occasion, he and his soon-to-be-ex had fought with their fists (Barrett can still hear the table tipping over, the sound the pepper mill made as it rolled lopsidedly across the floorboards). On another: a shouting match on Barrow Street, a bottle shattered (the words “falling in love” still suggest, to Barrett, green glass shards on a sidewalk under a streetlamp), and the voice of an old woman, neither shrill nor scolding, emanating from some low dark window, saying, simply, “Don’t you boys understand that people live here, people are trying to sleep,” like the voice of an exhausted mother.
As Barrett moved into his mid-, and then late, thirties, though, the partings increasingly tended to resemble business negotiations. They were not devoid of sorrow and accusation, but they had without question become less hysterical. They’d come to resemble deals and investments that had, unfortunately, gone wrong, despite early promises of solid returns.
This last parting, however, was his first to be conveyed by text, the farewell appearing, uninvited, unanticipated, on a screen no bigger than a bar of hotel soap. Hi Barrett I guess u know what this is about. Hey we gave it our best shot right?
Barrett did not, in fact, know what this was about. He got the message, of course—love, and whatever future love implied, had been canceled. But, I guess u know what this is about? That had been something like a dermatologist saying, offhandedly, after your annual checkup, I guess you know that that beauty mark on your cheek, that little chocolate-colored speck that has been referred to, more than once, as an aspect of your general loveliness (who was it who said Marie Antoinette’s penciled-on version had been in precisely that spot?), is actually skin cancer.
Barrett responded initially in kind, by text. An e-mail seemed elderly, a phone call desperate. So he tapped out, on tiny keys, Wow this is sudden how bout we talk a little, I’m where I always am. xxx.
By the end of the second day, Barrett had left two more texts, followed by two voice mails, and had spent most of the second night not leaving a third. By the end of day number three, he had not only received no reply of any kind, but also had begun to realize there would be no reply at all; that the sturdily built, earnest Canadian Ph.D. candidate (psychology, Columbia) with whom he’d shared five months of sex and food and private jokes, the man who’d said “I might actually love you” after Barrett recited Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria” while they were taking a bath together, the one who’d known the names of the trees when they spent that weekend in the Adirondacks, was simply moving on; that Barrett had been left standing on the platform, wondering how exactly he seemed to have missed his train.
I